Release Date: September 5, 2000

With "deeper and denser" likely to become the axiom for tomorrow's natural gas producers, the Department of Energy is adding five new projects to its natural gas research program.

For three of the projects, the target is natural gas buried under extremely hard rock formations, trapped in gas hydrates on the ocean floor, and in remote regions of the Arctic. The other two explore ways to keep low-volume "stripper" gas wells flowing and to boost the amount of "working gas" stored in salt caverns.

The projects are the latest to be selected from a broad-ranging competition conducted for the Energy Department's Office of Fossil Energy by the National Energy Technology Laboratory. The five projects have a total value approaching $7 million, $4.7 million of which will be the federal government's share.

Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, will lead two of the projects:

• A Revolutionary Way to Manufacture More Durable Drill Bits. In the early 1980s, Energy Department research led to the breakthrough bonding technique that made practical the diamond drill bits that now bore nearly 40 percent of U.S. wells. In this new project, Penn State will team with Dennis Tool Company, Houston, TX, to continue development of what is likely to be the next major advance in drill bit manufacturing.

  The team will advance its microwave sintering process which enhances the durability of "compositional grade" drill bit materials formed from diamond composites, tungsten carbide and other metals. The process takes only 1/10th the time of conventional bonding methods and produces higher-strength bits that wear longer and have a 20 to 30 percent increase in performance over conventionally made parts. The bits are also better able to resist acidic corrosion. The manufacturing process is likely to offer benefits in producing other drilling tools.

  Total Project Cost: $646,000 (DOE share: $323,000; participant's share: $323,000)
  Duration: 2 years
  Project Contact: Dinesh Agrawal, (814) 863-8034

• Keeping "Stripper Gas" Flowing. More than half of the onshore natural gas wells in the lower 48 States - more than 190,000 wells - are classified as "stripper wells," meaning that they produce a very low volume of natural gas. In the last seven years, more than 30,000 wells have been added to this category, and many of these wells are being plugged and abandoned even though, with better technology, they could continue to produce natural gas.

  To help identify projects that government and industry can co-fund to improve the performance of these wells, Penn State and the University of Tulsa, will form an industry-driven stripper gas well consortium, recruiting industry and academic members from across the country. The consortium will identify and fund research in such areas as reservoir remediation, wellbore cleanup, and surface system upgrades, all areas that could keep gas stripper wells in production. DOE's funding will be used for the federal portion of private sector proposals coordinated through the consortium.

  Total Project Cost: $4.3 million (DOE share: $3 million; participant's share: $1.3 million)
  Duration: 3 years
  Project Contact: Danelle Kissell, (814) 865-1372

The University of Texas at Austin, Bureau of Economic Geology, Austin, TX, was selected for a project in the Energy Department's gas hydrate research program:

• Detecting and Characterizing Gas Hydrates on the Ocean Floor. Gas hydrates are ice-like crystals that encase potentially huge supplies of natural gas on the ocean floor. They could potentially hold as much as 200 times more natural gas than exists in all the known gas resources in the United States. Yet, no one knows yet how best to locate hydrate deposits, measure their height, width, depth and other characteristics, and importantly, whether producing gas from hydrates could disturb the stability of ocean floors.

  In this project, the University of Texas's Bureau of Economic Geology will use its expertise in multi-component, 3-dimensional seismic imaging to study hydrates in the Gulf of Mexico. Seismic detectors will be placed on the ocean bottom to measure artificially-created sound waves that pulse through the bottom sediments (called "compressional" waves) and waves that move at various crossing angles (called "shear waves"). By combining the data received from both types of waves, researchers can gather more information about the way ocean sediments are deposited and intersect, how the hydrates and rock types are distributed through the sediments, and the type of material that fills the microscopic pores of the hydrate-bearing formation. Data can also be used to calculate how strong the sediments are bound together which can determine sea floor stability. This could ultimately enhance the safety of producing hydrate gas in the deep offshore.

  Total Project Cost: $880,000 (DOE share: $700,000; participant's share: $180,000)
  Duration: 2 years
  Project Contact: Bob Hardage, (512) 471-1534

To examine new drilling approaches for the Arctic environment, the Energy Department has selected the team of NANA Development Corp., and COMINCO, both of Anchorage, AK, and ARI, Arlington, VA:

• Miniature Mobile Drilling. One of the new advances in drilling technology is slimhole and microborehole drilling - concepts in which the borehole is much smaller than in conventional drilling. The technology can save costs and can result in smaller, more mobile drilling systems.

  In this project, the team will develop tools, techniques and algorithms for drilling wells of less than three inches in diameter in arctic conditions. A conceptual design of a miniature mobile system for drilling gas wells in remote locations will be developed. With a "footprint" one-third that of a conventional drill rig, the proposed slimhole system could be capable of drilling wells as less than 20 percent of today's costs. The technology could be especially useful for producing natural gas for remote Native Alaskan villages.

  Total Project Cost: $1,065,000 million (DOE share: $440,000; participant's share: $625,000)
  Duration: 2 years
  Project contact: John Rense, (907) 265-4145

Improving gas storage techniques is the focus of the project selected from RESPEC, Rapid City, SD:

• A Model for Gas Storage in Salt Caverns. Spotted throughout the country are sites where the gas industry stores natural gas for use in meeting peak demands. In areas where underground salt formations, called "domes," are prevalent, such as along the Gulf of Mexico coastline, caverns are dissolved in the salt to hold natural gas supplies.

  In this project, RESPEC will field test a technology developed in the Energy Department's gas storage research program that could improve the amount of gas that can be extracted efficiently and economically from salt cavern storage, the so-called "working gas." The company has adapted a mathematical model, called the Multimechaism Deformation Coupled Model, originally developed for the disposal of nuclear waste in salt formations. The model has been modified to make it useful in determining the minimum gas pressure for gas storage caverns in salt domes.

  RESPEC will test the model in two Bay Gas Storage Company caverns in the McIntosh salt dome near Mobile, AL, one of which is existing, the other to be constructed. If successful, gas companies could use the model to predict more accurately the behavior of the salt when natural gas is cycled into and out of the storage cavern. This, in turn, could help provide a scientific basis for determining minimum working gas pressures.

  Even modest improvements in storage capacity efficiencies could increase the amount of working gas capacity in existing salt caverns. RESPEC estimates that its technique could lead to as much as 13 billion cubic feet of additional working gas capacity being available to meet peak consumer demands from salt dome sites (currently approximately 125 billion cubic feet of gas storage capacity in salt domes exists at 29 U.S. sites).

  Total Project cost: $374,000 (DOE share: $277,000; participant's share: $97,000)
  Duration: 22 months
  Project contact: Gary Callahan, (605) 394-6400